Connected to Gettysburg, both of them

About 200 Civil War vets founded South Dakota's version

Jul. 4, 2013

Union re-enactors take part in commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg on Friday at Bushey Farm in Gettysburg, Pa. About 20 people from Sioux Falls participated in Gettysburg re-enactments. / Matt Rourke / AP

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Abraham Lincoln’s hallowed ground is in Pennsylvania, not Potter County in South Dakota.

The countryside around Gettysburg, Pa., roars with rifled musket and cannon fire again this summer as the epic battle of the Civil War is re-enacted on several occasions to commemorate its 150th anniversary.

Local Civil War re-enactors plan to march in the homecoming parade this fall, according to Bert Van Essen. But during July 1-3, the actual days the Battle of Gettysburg was fought, and through this weekend, “we all get to relax and fish,” McRoberts said.

Gettysburg, S.D., was founded in 1883, 20 years after the Battle of Gettysburg, by Civil War veterans. About 200 came to settle in north-central South Dakota. They took advantage of an 1872 law that allowed them to count their military service toward the five years of residency required to prove up a 160-acre homestead and gain clear title to the land.

The original plan was to call the town that would serve their homesteads Meade. The Post Office rejected it. Too many places already were named for Union Gen. George Meade who commanded the Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg. John Wesley Kennedy, who had fought in the battle as a junior officer in the 104th New York Volunteers, the Wadsworth Guards, suggested Gettysburg as an alternative town name.

It was adopted.

Kennedy also built the first house in Gettysburg. He served eight terms as a justice of the peace, was sergeant at arms in the South Dakota Legislature in 1911 and was the first county auditor, said Van Essen, a retired Gettysburg minister, Civil War re-enactor and local historian. Kennedy died in 1918.

He had gumption. He went into the army as a private and came out a captain. The 104th New York fought in many of the war’s defining battles, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and the Wilderness, in addition to Gettysburg. Kennedy’s own military career hit a speed bump at some point before Gettysburg when he was court-martialed. His men, supposed to be on guard duty, were discovered “either gone or asleep,” according to Van Essen. “I couldn’t find any record of what they did to him.”

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At Gettysburg, Kennedy’s unit of 330 suffered 184 killed, wounded or captured. Kennedy was taken prisoner as the 104th was driven off Seminary Ridge by a larger Confederate force. He escaped from a South Carolina prison camp and walked 250 miles before finding Gen. William T. Sherman’s Union army. He finished the war serving in Sherman’s famous March to the Sea.

Gettysburg’s founding fathers apparently held their Civil War service close to their hearts all their days. In later years, a number of them used to winter in Florida. They established an old soldiers’ home in St. Cloud, Fla. Marjorie Houck said her husband, Robert, remembers a grandfather who as a boy went south for the winter, accompanying his own grandfather, Charles Houck, a veteran of the 54th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry.

“He kept a baby alligator in a tank of water and brought it back to South Dakota on the train,” she said.

For all the war meant as a defining event in the lives of Gettysburg’s founders, fascination with it failed to survive the decades. Not many of Gettysburg’s 1,200 residents express much interest in the town’s past, said Van Essen and Marjorie Houck.

The local corps of about 33 re-enactors has sponsored five Civil War re-enactments. “We just ran out of gas, is what we did,” Van Essen said. “We can’t do another one. It’s too much work.”

Gettysburg, S.D., and Gettysburg, Pa., are sister cities, and Van Essen said he’s been treated like a prince the five times he went to Pennsylvania to visit the battlefield. “It’s a holy place for me.”

But it’s just a fact, South Dakota prairie is not the Pennsylvania farmland where approximately 25,000 Union troops, half the battle’s casualties, were killed or injured in summer 1863 for “that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion,” as Lincoln noted in his Gettysburg Address.

If you want the Gettysburg experience, you’ve got to go to Gettysburg.

Kevin Gansz did.

He’s the Siouxland Heritage Museums curator of education, and he joined about 20 people from the Sioux Falls area who went to Pennsylvania June 27-30 to take part in the Blue Gray Alliance Gettysburg re-enactment. With about 10,000 participants, it took place on a scale that gave a real feel for the scope of the battle.

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“We had been getting ready for this for about a year-and-a-half,” Gansz said. Much of the time was spent doing research on the units they were re-enacting. The first day, Gansz’s group was part of the famous Iron Brigade that was almost destroyed in the initial fighting as it held a position that gave the Union army time to occupy high ground south of Gettysburg.

The second day they were part of the 83rd Pennsylvania Infantry that defended Little Round Top against a Confederate attack that could have rolled up the left wing of the Union army had it succeeded.

The final day, as members of the 13th Vermont on the far left of the Union line, they executed a wheeling movement and poured deadly fire into advancing Confederates to help break up Pickett’s Charge and ruin the Confederacy’s last chance to win the battle and, ultimately, the war.

Doing all this in a huge company on the actual battlefield caused time to slip a cog for Gansz.

“We talk about those magic moments. We understand what it is to re-enact. You can use the same equipment, deal with bad weather, bad food,” he said. “But you hope for a few of those moments in your re-enacting. I think I had a couple this weekend.”

It happened when he glimpsed Confederate soldiers slipping through a dimly lit evening woods with musket fire echoing all about. It happened again when Gansz volleyed into Pickett’s Charge. Suddenly it was 1863.

“It was amazing to re-enact what actually happened, to see so many on the ground then straggling back, to think this is what actually happened 150 years ago.

“Plenty of times in my re-enacting, I have wondered what possesses a person to do what I was about to re-enact. What possesses somebody to walk up a hill knowing there was almost certain death waiting for you there?”

At the conclusion of Pickett’s Charge, when “cease fire” was called, “the first thing our guys did was shake hands with the guys coming across the field at us,” Gansz said, a sign the re-enactment was a powerful experience for re-enactors in both blue and gray.

Lincoln concluded the Gettysburg address: “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

It really happened. Civil War veterans two decades after the fighting could travel west to take up lives as homesteaders and build a new town on the prairie. And now, 150 years later, as the meaning of Gettysburg is being revisited, in the South Dakota town of the name, residents get to relax and fish.

If you stretch the context, Lincoln might have had a comment about that, too, in the Gettysburg Address.

“It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this,” he said.